11 Features Your Employees Look For in a CMS Intranet

CMS Intranet Features

The benefits of an effective CMS Intranet for your company are numerous. In fact, we’ve covered quite a few of them in this space. But as it turns out, your employees may not care as much about these reasons as you think. Instead of worrying about the business-wide difference and improvements an intranet can make, they are more interested in the personal benefits derived from using that software. If you cannot convince your employees of these personal benefits, you will inevitably struggle to achieve company-wide adoption of the intranet software. To ensure that is not the case, knowing just what your employees are looking for to make their professional life easier – and what intranet software can do to deliver these benefits – is crucial. Communicating the below 11 features with tangible benefits for your employees helps create an internal environment ripe for adoption.

1) A Company Calendar

A calendar of company events should be a core feature of any CMS intranet. Ideally, this calendar can be customized for individual divisions and teams, enabling your employees to organize their daily life of meetings and collaborations easily and efficiently. Reminders and personalized invitations to projects or events help keep productivity on track.

2) Benefit Information

Another popular feature that will save both your employees and your HR office significant time is a comprehensive overview of employee benefits. This may include a simple outline of the health insurance, retirement plan, leave information, and other important benefits, or a more dynamic page that enables your employees to determine their current leave balance or more.

3) A Staff Directory

Especially larger companies benefit greatly from a single spot in which all of the internal contact information of employees at various levels can be found. Having to look up that information in a paper directory is inconvenient, and calling an operator or using an email lookup feature can take unnecessary time. Hosting your staff directory within your internet simplifies the process for employees looking to touch base with their colleagues.

4) An Intuitive Search

When building your intranet, planning out your navigation will be a major step in determining its effectiveness. And yet, especially if your internal presence includes many of the above and below features, your employees may still find it difficult to find the information they need quickly and efficiently. Rather than risking frustration and non-use, implement an intuitive search that allows your workforce to find contact information, specific events, benefits, and more with a single query.

5) Collaboration Opportunities

Not many of your employees are likely to work in isolation. More often, they work with members of their own or other departments on larger projects, which require constant and effective communication. And in the course of that communication, many employees grow tired of organizing every bit of meeting minutes and feedback in their email account of paper folders. Tools like team forums enable storage of team-wide communication centrally, making collaboration easier and more successful.

6) Insights into Decision Making

Research consistently finds that employees who know about and are invested in the company’s overall direction become more successful and productive. They want to know the reason behind their individual responsibilities, and just where high-level decision makers are driving the company.

An intranet enables them to get these insights. Internal news tools allow members of the C-Suite to share company updates and trends that provide context to the work of individual employees and make them feel more involved. Meanwhile, internal blogging allows company leaders to share their strategic thoughts and plans for the company, increasing the feeling of involvement for employees.

7) A Feedback Feature

Employees want to have their say and feel like their opinion counts on a company-wide basis. Unfortunately, many businesses do not have systems set up that can efficiently gather that feedback, often leading to employee discontent and decreased productivity. An intranet that can help them express their thoughts and feelings about their job and the company’s direction, on the other hand, both reduces employee turnover and improves job satisfaction.

8) Ubiquitous Access

Whether they travel or work from remote locations, your employees do not only require access to their intranet resources from their desk in your company offices. Ideally, they need access from any location and device, enabling them to work on their team project or simply check their personal project calendar while they’re on the road, at home, or elsewhere. An intranet that is only accessible within company premises can lead to frustration and a lack of adoption.

9) Employee Recognition

You might know about the powerful effects that recognizing your employees have on their morale. A simple activity like naming an employee of the month can drastically raise their productivity and strengthen their emotional connection with their work.

Making this recognition public and easily accessible to all employees magnifies its effect, enabling your workers to strive for the praise in the eyes of their peers. Through dedicated pages as well as the news and blogging options mentioned above, you can enhance employee recognition and make your workers feel appreciated.

10) Career Advancement Tools

Hardly any worker will be satisfied to stay in their current position for the entirety of their career. Instead, they consistently seek career advancement, and hosting career advancement tools on your intranet can help you improve user adoption and delight.

For example, consider posting jobs internally on your intranet to give your employees the first chance to make the step up to a new position. You can also post career advancement tips through your internal communication channels, from an explanation of the value of a LinkedIn profile to the intricacies of keeping an updated resume or CV. Depending on the size of your company, even hosting internal career advancement webinars on your intranet can drive your workers to your platform.

11) Focused Distractions

No employee will be focused on their work 100% of their time. In fact, one study found that the average office worker gets distracted every 3 minutes, and it can take up to 23 minutes to focus on the original task once again after the initial distraction occurs. Personal social media use, of course, is among the main culprits.

Your CMS intranet will not be able to help you eliminate this potential for distraction altogether. But it can help you create distractions that will help, rather than hurt your employee productivity in the long run. Instead of enabling them to visit Facebook, why not create an internal social network in which they can exchange their thoughts with co-workers? Doing so ensures that they don’t lose complete focus on their work, and actually improves employee togetherness and morale in the long term. If it offers focused distractions, your intranet will soon become a favorite bookmark among your employees.

Moving your internal communications to an intranet structure requires employee adoption on every level. Unfortunately, your individual employees are not often looking for the same benefits that you or your company consider when implementing the software.

Keeping the unique needs and desires of your employees in mind when developing and implementing a CMS intranet enables your business to create a communications solution that your employees will love to use. A high adoption rate will lead to its full functionality, and ultimately a more productive workplace. To learn more about intranet cms software and its ROI potential, contact us.